The contest was closer than the Illini-North Carolina game.
Last Friday we asked which is more thrilling, a great moment in sports or entertainment, and you split right down the middle. (One reader sounds like she votes for the arts in theory, sports in actuality, though she never makes the call.)
Here are some of your responses (occasionally edited for space):
CHICAGO — I think this question is a no-brainer when you break it down to its most basic element and look at what it’s really asking. What’s better: Real or fake?
Answer to your question is sports.
— Matt McGinn
JOLIET — While there is no question in my mind which is more thrilling, I must admit that being a professor of theater probably biases my opinion. Plus, I have no interest in sports at all; getting excited over who is going to win a particular game seems rather silly to me.
The best theater and film can not only entertain but enlighten. The best playwrights and screenwriters can provoke thought, make us question our beliefs and perceptions, and help us see ourselves and others in a different light. Sports can do none of those things.
— Clay Kirkland
SEATTLE — I have to go with scripted drama — well-scripted of course. A bomb exploding on a TV show generally doesn’t get my heart racing. But heartfelt exchanges and scenes concerning key life issues and questions [are] far more likely to make me lose myself than any sports contest.
I simply cannot get that excited about a ball going through a hoop, or into a net, or into the right or wrong hands. I enjoy watching sports and competitions, but when the game’s over the majority of us go back to real life; it makes absolutely no difference except to those gullible enough to buy overpriced tickets to stuff pockets of fat cats who aren’t even playing or coaching.
The best sports exchanges are those seen on Little League fields, where it truly is all about the kids loving the game.
— Ephy Kileen
CHICAGO — As entertaining as the arts can be, nothing can replicate genuine drama of sports. At the highest level, moments like the 1980 U.S. hockey team [Olympics victory over the Soviet Union] stay with you forever because they are too improbable to be scripted.
Even at the lowest level, a badly played sporting event is more entertaining than a badly executed play or movie. The possibility of the unknown in live-action sports is much greater. The worst thing about a bad movie is you can tell exactly what is going to happen. You can never say that about a sporting event.
— Sean Sullivan
NORTHFIELD — I vote sports. It’s grittier. The arts produce memorable performances. But sports produce memorable moments and memories. It’s the real thing.
— Jenny Kwon
CHICAGO — As a loyal Illini, I was as excited as anybody in watching last Saturday’s game [vs. Arizona]. I also think that there is nothing more beautiful than opera. Monday night brings both the final NCAA game, and the first night of the Wagner “Ring” cycle at Lyric Opera — for which I subscribed many months ago.
The basketball game will undoubtedly be more fun. The opera will undoubtedly be more beautiful — and the four operas that constitute the Cycle, when performed within a period of six nights, is more exciting than any multigenerational, multiyear soap opera could be.
What to do? I have seen the Ring Cycle before. I have seen Illinois play basketball before but not in the NCAA final game. I know how the Ring Cycle ends. I don’t know how the game will end. I could tape the game and rush home after the opera to view it — hopefully with not unintentionally learning the outcome of the game — but that won’t be the same.
To answer your inquiry, I generally would select certain arts over sports. I guess I won’t be able to truthfully answer your inquiry until 7:30 Monday night, when the curtain rises on “Das Rheingold” — 2 1/2 hours with no intermission.
— Gary G. Belkin
Addendum: This writer wrote back after opting to see “Das Rheingold” live and to watch the Illinois-North Carolina game afterward on tape, much to the perplexity of his wife and other Illini friends.
“My decision was right for me,” Belkin wrote. “It worked well except for the [basketball] score.”
CHICAGO — Once upon a time sports and arts were not so different. It dates back to the Greeks and Romans and how their entertainment events were also sporting events in which people got incredibly involved. Audiences watching bear-baiting, gladiators and plays all reacted loudly and boldly. Even in Shakespeare’s time audiences would speak to the actors on stage, becoming very involved in the process of watching plays.
Somewhere along the line theater in the U.S. has lost a lot of that feeling. A theater artist said, “You have to watch this all quietly and in the dark,” and we have never been the same since, sadly.
I’m a theater professional here in Chicago. I dream of creating the same audience dynamic in the theater as one would see at a sporting event. That takes incredible skill, a great script and amazing acting, and then it’s amazing. When a whole audience gasps, it’s as brilliant as a crowd cheering the Illini.
I also have grown up with basketball, as I’m from an Indiana family. I love when the theater can make me feel the on-edge excitement of a game. But it happens so seldom, unfortunately.
— Nicole Gilman
EVANSTON — I teach “Writing the Suspense Thriller” at Northwestern, and last weekend I composed my syllabus accompanied by the wondrous distraction of those magnificent Elite Eight basketball games. In comparing the emotional effect of those showdowns and other sporting events I’ve witnessed against the cumulative effect of “Psycho,” “The Exorcist,” “Wait Until Dark,” “The Silence of the Lambs” and a host of chair-gripping others, I have to cast my ballot on your thrill-o-meter with drama in the arts.
Although I’ll never forget Jim Bunning’s perfect game against the Mets on Father’s Day 1964 when I screamed my little head off in the stands at Shea Stadium, and I’m not likely to ever part with the full team-autographed 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers baseball that my father bought me one sunny afternoon at Ebbets Field, it is the long-term emotional effect of the arts that will last the longest because it cuts the deepest. In the long run, the rattle of subconscious fear evoked by the arts slam-dunks the murmur of conscious memory evoked by athletics like MJ soaring to the hoop.
— Bill Bleich
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mcaro@tribune.com
